Cut Out

Website - with visual material, video/audio and text

For the artwork Cut Out Ben Cain and Tina Gverović created a specific graphic interface at which they uploaded text, drawings, photographs and videos available on a specially designed webpage: https://mmsu.hr/kamov-online/ . In order to fully experience the artwork please click on the windows to enlarge and run the content.

If It Happens Let It
A series of combinations of moving and still images that overlay the processes of fabrication, product, and worker. We’re working primarily with images of hands and arms, various patterned fabrics, and found clips of weaving machines. The process of layering these three elements, and interchanging product for worker, fabrication for product etc. results in various images and short videos, and some digression, but much of the work is tied together through thinking about people not as things and objects but rather as powerful and vulnerable subjects.

Cut out, cut up, cut back, jump cuts.
Moving cut-n-paste body parts (hands, arms) are placed on patterned fabric backgrounds, which are in turn placed on looped clips of fast-moving machine parts. Bodies flattened out, becoming patterns, abstractions and attractions. The images, with their pretty textures and colours might be displaying things for ‘viewing pleasure’, to be desired, to be consumed.
Aimlessly performing, or goal-less working. Aimless isn’t really the right word. There are ‘aims’, but they’re not necessarily immediately understandable or recogniseable. The aim might be for a body to move freely, fluidly, awkwardly, but without a strict sense of purpose or outcome.

We are not a thing – that’s a pretty inane statement? We know that bodies shouldn’t be treated as raw material, but they often are.

The bodies, or body-parts seen in these images and videos might come across as uncanny raw material that’s aimlessly doing its own thing, equally they might be cut-off things incessantly labouring even without having any clearly defined work to do or objective in mind.

The intentions involved in combining moving-image parts of people next to photos of fabric next to video clips of machinery next to spoken or written text next to… aren’t necessarily fully resolved; and although we might be thinking about how bodies might explore and enjoy their own possibilities of movement (however micro), and how they might be co-opted, unwilling participants in other people’s narratives and work regimes, packaged and promoted… we’re not sure yet if or how any of that will be tangible in what we make during the residency.

Ben Cain/Tina Gverović
video/sound editing: Josipa Miličević
sound design: Ilia Gverović Cain
web assistance and interface design: Mihael Giba
thanks to: Goran Ferčec
London/Rijeka, 2020.

• https://mmsu.hr/kamov-online/